Echoes

Most of my old friends might think by this title of “Pink Floyd” with the identical title from the B side of their album “Meddle”.
Anyway, the Echoes I wanna talk today is Microsoft’s latest platform offer for telco’s. Mary-Jo Foley writes in her ZD-blog that summary I’ll quote at first:

“1. Echoes will assign a local mobile number to each Windows Live contact
2. Via its Address Book sync capabilities, Echoes will push these new new contacts into any mobile phone (no client required)
3. The user will be able to compose an SMS or place a voice call to these contacts
4. Echoes will ensure text messages are delivered to Windows Live contacts as chat conversations, and replies will be sent back from Messenger as SMS
5. Voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user’s PC
6. As the mobile user will appear always “online” to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations also will be able to start from the Windows Live cloud, pushed to the mobile as SMS.”

some remarks on that:
1. The idea is simple and great. SMS and chat are basically the same:
short messages between 2 people. To combine computer chat with sms is just a extension to an other device.
They by Microsofts nature try to push only their own chat service (Messenger). Thats short thinking. Soon other providers will deliver the same with any chat system. Guess what the telco’s will choose?